OS X Mavericks: Create AppleScript to Show Word Count in TextEdit

I’m a user experience designer, and I specifically focus on user onboarding, spend time with real users to gather some qualitative research, write UX copy that’s intuitive and readable by human, test product hypotheses with minimum effort, act as a common bridge in between design & development, write user stories than product features, pull down data from multiple channels to measure its output and convert them into actionable insights to improve ROI.

Published

Updated

Mavericks is the latest OS from Apple and most of you must have upgraded by now. Word Count is really important especially for creative writers and search engine professionals. For instance, if you are going to write an article having 350, 500 to 1000 words respectively, you can use Microsoft Word App, right!

But what if you don’t?

There are other writers on mac who prefer its default text application called TextEdit because it’s tiny and fast. Alternately, you can also try Evernote to organize your text content including the word count.

But why to use simple text format?

Because, when you paste these text on any WYSIWYG editor such as WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, only the destination formatting (fonts, color, etc.) would be retained before publishing. This is also preferable by most of the web designers who write blog posts in html format. So let’s create one for Mavericks…

Create AppleScript to Show Word Count in TextEdit, Mavericks

DiY: Step 1

Open Applications → Utilities → AppleScript Editor

DiY: Step 2

Go to Preference Panel → General Panel
or use the shortcut (Command + ,) to access it. Now make sure you check the option “Show Script menu in menu bar” as shown in the screenshot below and close the window.

DiY: Step 3

Go to your OS X Mavericks Disk → Library → Scripts Folder and create a new folder called “TextEdit Scripts”. This disk has to be your default os disk or else it won’t work. You need this reference in Step 6, let’s continue.

DiY: Step 4

Go back to AppleScript Editor and click New Document by clicking on the New Document button or go to File → New.

DiY: Step 5

Copy the following apple script for TextEdit and Paste in as shown in the screenshot below.

tell application "TextEdit"
set WordCount to the number of words in the the front document
display dialog "The wordcount is: " & WordCount
end tell

DiY: Step 6

Go to File → Save, Select the folder TextEdit Scripts (this is the same folder you have created in step 3). *If you are unable to see finder location, click on the little down arrow button to expand the finder location as shown in the screenshot below.

DiY: Step 7

Change file name “Untitled” to “Word Count” and hit the Save button as shown below.

That’s it.

Optional: By adding a “Tag” name you can access it quicker on OS X Mavericks.

DiY: Step 8 or Testing

Open TextEdit app and paste some random text just to test.
Now Select AppleScript Editor’s icon from your apple menubar (located in the upper right corner). Look for TextEdit Scripts folder and click Word Count.

Done! So did you manage to create your word count script on Mavericks?

I’m a user experience designer, and I specifically focus on user onboarding, spend time with real users to gather some qualitative research, write UX copy that’s intuitive and readable by human, test product hypotheses with minimum effort, act as a common bridge in between design & development, write user stories than product features, pull down data from multiple channels to measure its output and convert them into actionable insights to improve ROI.